Appreciate the responses. Do I need to worry about adequate expansion room for the new hardwood if I don't remove the existing baseboards and just use shoe molding? We had the house built 20 years ago and the hardwood and carpets were installed underneath the 4.5 inch baseboards. I really don't care to lose a portion of the height of my baseboards by using quarter round or shoe molding. This would result in a "mismatched" look when compared to the baseboards in my other rooms. My preference is to have the baseboards removed prior to the new floor installation. I just have to decide if it makes more sense to try to preserve the original baseboards for re-installation or have new baseboards installed and painted. Here are some pics of the trim and baseboards in the 2 rooms that will have hardwood installed. Both rooms were recently painted, but I don't mind repainting baseboards as long as I get the best quality installation of the new floors and baseboards that look like these again when done. Dining Room Great Room

For stripping, a lot depends on the paint you are trying to remove...how old is the house? how many layers? any chance it is lead paint? Are you planning to paint or stain the treads once they are stripped? If you've only got a couple layers and/or if it's not lead paint, a heat gun may work well. Otherwise, you'll want a stripper. We stripped the stairs in our last house - a 200 year old farmhouse with about 15 layers of flaking nasty paint. I started with conventional methylene chloride (I think) based stripper. Each application would get one layer off and it was taking forever - I worked on 2 stair treads for about 3 solid days and they still weren't done. I tried a heat gun but it wasn't all that effective either, plus it's not really safe on lead paint. Plus the bottom layer or two were milk paint, which is near-impossible to strip with either a heat gun or regular stripper. I ended up using Peel Away, which is a lye based product - you paint it on like paste and cover it with special wax paper. Then you leave it sit for 24-48 hours. When you remove the paper and scrape off the peel away, the paint comes with it. You then wash the new wood and spray it with vinegar to neutralize the lye (otherwise your wood will continue to get eaten away). Peel away was great because 1) it eliminated a lot of elbow grease - the stripper did the work for us, 2) it was nasty, but not nearly as nasty as the meth chloride stripper, 3) it is considered one of the best strippers for lead paint because something in the lye bonds with the lead and prevents it from being absorbed by the body. Plus the lead paint stays wet and gooey, and never has a chance to get scattered as dust like it would be if you were scraping/sanding. Alas, it's not all peachy though. Peel Away (at least the formulation we used - they have a few different ones) can discolor/darken the wood, so it's best to use on wood you are planning to repaint, not stain. We stained the treads and painted the risers and handrail and you could definitely see the discoloration where we stained (we prefered to think of it as "patina" though!). It also didn't get all the paint out of the little cracks. In places it made the wood very soft so we had to be very careful when removing it - we gouged the wood in several places. Oh, and one thing I noticed was that you REALLY have to soak the thing in vinegar (which raises the grain) - if you don't neutralize it enough, you will wake up one day 3 months later to find your new paint job sliding down off the wall because the peel away has eaten it away from the backside. (Ask me how I know this....) Even with the Peel Away, it took us several months of weekends to get all the trim stripped in our house - it's a dirty messy job, but worth it in the end. HTH! Good luck!

I got my first painting experience last year when we finishsed our 1100 sf basement, but it was "virgin" territory--no baseboards, etc. Last month was my first excursion in painting an already "finished" room. I decided to tape off my moldings and tried a new tape I'd just read about--"Frog tape". I used it on the most visible moldings and the regular blue tape elsewhere (because Frog tape is a bit more expensive). I then cut-in without any worry and have a PERFECT line because the frog tape prevents any bleeding. To further protect my baseboards, I used brown paper (don't know what it's called--it's about 10" wide and comes in a long roll at Lowe's, etc.) along the baseboard, using the frog or blue tape to hold it in place. Place the tape at the top of the molding and score it to seal, but don't push the bottom of the tape down until you run the brown paper along the bottom of the baseboard, under the tape. This work was more time-consuming and tiresome than the actual painting, but looks great in the end. I'm sure that with practice, I could probably cut-in the moldings just fine, but I need to get to that point first (I do great at the ceiling).

Maybe since he was a flooring guy he used flooring adhesive. I saw this on a forum where someone said he used it on a fiberglass boat with no harm. Flooring adhesive remover